If it isn’t evident yet, it will be… 2012 is going to be one for the books. We didn’t just ring in a New Year, we rang in the new norms for conducting business. PMO’s now more than ever are expected to continually adjust and embrace the new revolutionary model. Gartner is predicting that PPM (Project Portfolio Management) leaders will be forced to respond by embracing a new emerging revolutionary model that requires constantly changing organizational structures, tools and processes.

Last month I listened to “Talking Technology” Gartner’s Monthly Newsletter Audio Magazine. Host Scott Smith was interviewing Gartner’s Research Managing VP, Daryl Plummer, about his top IT predictions for 2012. Plummer said he expects CIO’s to play a more strategic role in the business, by predicting what IT trends are coming and how to take advantage of them.

Keeping up with the trends seems simple enough but the ever evolving idea of “trends” has taken on a new twist in 2012.

Plummer went on to talk about the evolution of what I’m going to call the big 3… the cloud, social and mobile. All three of these components will come together in 2012 and this growth of information is expected to form a new business phenomenon.

Plummer defined mobile as the access mechanism, social as the behavioral style or interaction style, and the cloud as the means of delivery. The big three come together to create information, the analytical foundation that will drive your strategic business decisions. All these components makeup today’s new business phenomenon.

Plummer also raised the issue of the idea of “Big Data”. “Because of the new evolving norms of doing business through social, mobile and the cloud applications, information is coming at us fast and furious, in structured and unstructured forms. It’s more information coming at us then we have time to analyze,” said Plummer. Gartner predicts that by 2015 more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies will fail to effectively properly exploit big data for a competitive advantage.

So how are companies supposed to adapt? Executives and Project Managers must embrace the new norm. You can’t fight it, you can’t stop it, you have to be the first to implement them right by choosing a flexible solution to aide in your strategic planning and to help create and monitor processes for selecting the right work for a profitable portfolio. You need to be able to bring all information into one central location so nothing falls through the cracks, and be able to adjust and reinvent your approach from Project Management to Marketing.

Like most of you, we at EPM Live strive to always be on top of the trends, but we have one thing that sets us apart from the rest…our products. EPM Live’s PortfolioEngine takes the pain out of Portfolio Planning. PortfolioEngine is a SharePoint-based, top-down Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Solution that empowers executives to make critical business decisions with confidence. Leveraging EPM Live’s award winning PortfolioEngine capabilities, this tool will put you one step ahead of the competition helping you achieve a competitive advantage by choosing the right projects to drive your business toward its strategic objectives.

Here’s a look at some of PortfolioEngine’s capabilities that will help Project Managers and Executives stay on top of the new business phenomenon.

Increased visibility into real-time project investment status, allowing the user to monitor progress in terms of actuals and forecasts on key dimensions such as cost, schedules, benefits and risks.

Leverage portfolio analytics tools to make better decisions when selecting projects and work for execution. Gain real-time insight into rich analytics such as color-coded heat maps and portfolio modeling capabilities.

Create resource capacity plans to get a true picture of resource demand across all work. Estimate role-based resource hours to ensure the resource plan can be fulfilled given current resource workload and availability.

Design custom workflows to automate business processes across the enterprise. Project workflows may include document reviews, approvals, stage-gating and archiving, among others. Quickly create workflows to take care of routine processes on project sites, such as sending notifications or creating tasks.

And remember, “You have to figure out how your company is going to deal with cloud, social, mobile and information. These four forces are affecting everything that you do and by understanding where you stand with these items will give you the foundation for evaluating your own future. Without that it will be a rough ride…with it you can actually open the door to new opportunities you may not have even realized exist,” Daryl Plummer, Gartner’s Research Managing VP.